So this is what it sounded like from Peoria High fans. “Give that girl an OSCAR!” The girl was flat out on the floor, face down, unmoving. The girl had been bludgeoned across the bridge of her nose with an elbow thrown by a Peoria High player. Face down in the paint, with a gaggle of Peoria High fans screaming that she was faking it, Brandi Bisping didn’t move even as play swirled around and over her. I heard my voice. It said, “Stop the damned game.”

Play stopped only when the ball went out of bounds. Only then did Bisping sit up. She thought, “If I try to stand up, I’ll pass out.” She sat until someone helped her up. She walked off. She had the slow, wobbling, fixed-gaze gait of a busted-up fighter. In a frenetic, ferocious game played at maximum speed with mercy neither given nor asked by either side, Bisping already had been cut and bleeding, had been cracked across the forehead, and had been knocked to the floor a dozen other times.

Now, with 9.6 seconds to play, the Morton High School Lady Potters were near victory in a Martin Luther King Winter Classic game at Galesburg’s John Thiel Gymnasium.

Bisping walked to the Morton bench and sat there through a timeout called by coach Bob Becker.

She didn’t sit long.

To run an in-bounds play with 6.1 seconds to play, Becker wanted Bisping handling the throw-in.

When she came running to take the ball from a referee, those Peoria High fans again turned to sarcasm.

“Praise God, you made it,” is what Bisping heard them say.

She raised both arms to them and she looked at them, none having bled this day, none hammered in the head twice, none about to enjoy a victory well-earned.

Brandi Bisping heard herself shout to them, “Yes, praise God.”

Some days, y’know, it’s just a pleasure to be on the same planet with these Lady Potters, let alone in the same building.

With Bisping scoring her team’s last two points on free throws for a six-point lead with 39.4 seconds to play, the Potters defeated Peoria High, 54-53. The margin was that thin only because Peoria threw in an uncontested 3-pointer at the buzzer.

The game turned in a 70-second stretch of the third quarter. Peoria High led at halftime, 30-26, on the scoring of sensational guard Jailynn Lawson and post player Mackenzie Jenkins. But Lawson left in the second quarter with a sprained ankle. And Jenkins lost her way against Morton’s defense – especially against Bisping’s unyielding presence.

It was Jenkins, angry and frustrated, who threw the elbow, while clearing a rebound, that flattened Bisping. Bisping’s game-long strong answer: her 12 rebounds. She characterized the game as “physical.” Peoria coach Meechie Edwards called it “hard-fought.” Bob Becker said, “There was blood in the coach’s box.” From three rows up in the bleachers, I saw a title fight.

With Lawson gone and Jenkins getting worn out, the Potters went on that 70-second, 10-0 run midway through the third quarter. They were down, 32-29, when Kassidy Shurman tied it with a 3-pointer from the left corner. Tenley Dowell followed with a back-cut layup off a Bisping pass, with a free throw added. Then Josi Becker – a dynamo at point guard, bringing the ball upcourt at max speed against max pressure all day – dropped in a fast-break layup. She added a 17-footer to give Morton a 39-32 lead with 2:55 to play in the third.

Suddenly, the Potters were in charge. In the game’s last 11 minutes, Peoria once moved within two points but never closer. At 43-41, Dowell made a 3-pointer. At 46-43, the sophomore pulled off another of her imaginative driving layups, somehow kissing the ball off the glass after letting it first slip from her hands in mid-air. And added one. It was 49-43.

By then the Potters had established their refusal to lose. They were again victims of their own errors, losing the ball on unforced errors more often than any coach likes. Too often they seemed to pass where someone used to be or where they thought someone would be. “We need to polish the machine,” Becker said. “But I’d rather win a game and learn from it than lose a game and learn from it.”

The indispensable Josi Becker led Morton’s scoring with 14. Dowell had 12. Shurman had 8, Bisping 7, Jacey Wharram 5, Courtney Jones 4, Lindsey Dullard and Caylie Jones 2 each.

Oh, one thing more.

I waited outside the Morton locker room to talk to Bisping.

“She’ll be out in a little bit,” one player told me.

I figured she was exhausted.

“She’s still in there,” another said.

Maybe she was woozy.

Then another played said, “She’s ordering Jimmy John’s.”

Never heard that one before of a star late to meet the press. But, hey, this is not the NBA. This is better. Turns out it was Brandi Bisping’s duty, as a senior, as a captain, as leader, to gather orders from her teammates and put in a call to Jimmy John’s for lunch between today’s games at 10:30 and 5:30.

Last seen this morning, Bisping was headed for the team bus carrying a cardboard box likely full of Jimmy John’s ham, swiss, roast beef, provolone, tuna, turkey, and genoa salami decorated with lettuce, tomato, mayo, sauce, and, to quote the Galesburg menu, “a real tasty Italian vinaigrette.”

As for the afternoon game, won by Morton over Peoria Notre Dame, 69-52, Becker said, “We did some really good things and we made some really bone-headed plays.” He was concerned some but not all that much with the Potters’ allowing Notre Dame to move from 15 points down in the first half to within 10 late in the fourth quarter. “These are the kind of teams we’ll be playing in the regional and sectional,” he said. “And we can’t let good teams stick around. We’ve got to put them away.”

Morton is now 22-2 for the year. In their back-to-back state championship seasons, the Potters were 21-3 at this point a year ago and 22-2 the year before.

Dowell led Morton against Notre Dame with 20 points. Bisping had 17 (and 8 more rebounds). Dullard had 8, Courtney Jones 6. Shurman, Josie Becker, and Caylie Jones had 5 each. Maddy Becker had 3.

So Morton finished the MLK with a 4-1 record. No one yet knows who won the tournament. There’s a game Monday. In seven years, Morton has won the thing six times and is now 33-2 all-time.

I mentioned the time between games. The team rested at a lake house at Oak Run. Here’s a note on another way to kill time.

We walked to the Galesburg fieldhouse for a game there. The fieldhouse is a quarter mile from Thiel. One player’s grandmother walked further. She couldn’t find a door open. Up stairs, down stairs, all around. Finally she saw referees inside. They let her in. “I’ll never say another bad word about referees,” she said, and they said, “We’ve heard that before.”

I offered her a breath-saving ride back to Thiel. I led the way to my Jeep. There I tossed some papers out of the back seat and waited. Then I waited more. Then I got out of my Jeep to look for her and her partner, another grandmother. I spotted them in a car. Not my car. It was red, and my car is red, but the women had climbed into someone else’s red car. “I wondered, it was really messy with soda cans,” the first lost grandmother said later. “I did think a sportswriter would be neater.”

We finally assembled in my car for the drive back to the gym. The grandmother said, “This little adventure will be our secret, right?”

Of course. I would never reveal a source’s name. But her initials are Becky Jones.